Wednesday, February 13, 2013

February 7, 2013 - 8 months old

This month has had a lot of ups and downs.

The ups have been that this little rascal has been crawling so fast!!! We have to keep our eyes on her at all times. She can crawl from room to room so quickly, that by the time is takes us to reach her, she already has her hands on her target! Now she likes to reach into her toy box and pull out the toys that she wants to play with - what a big girl!

Last month she started to crawl forward, and almost immediately after, she started to want to stand. Now that's all she wants to do. She stands against the coffee tables, the couch, chairs, crib..anything that she can climb up on. She stands for about 5 minutes at a time and bangs the surface like a drum - as if she's saying "You're fired!"

Her favourite new foods are blueberries, apricots and sweet corn.

Right now she loves anything that doesn't look like a baby toy...so I give her a lot of cooking things to play with, like plastic saucers, and (sealed) plastic spices, plastic funnels,etc. She likes to play on the kitchen floor while I wash the dishes! Her favourite thing are large spoons, since she is teething so badly. I think she is going to get her top teeth soon.

I like to read her books during the day, and her favourite book is called "Everyone Eats" by Julia Kuo. Each page has an animal and what they eat - eg. "Deer eat lettuce". Her second favourite book is also about food, "Each peach pear plum" where at the end of the story, all these characters share a plum pie. I think we have a foodie on our hands!

She loves sing songs and rhymes, and she wants me to sing while she dances. What a total ham. I feel like we are putting on a performance every day! When I take her to the baby story times at the library, she likes to be the centre of attention. I take her every week, so I constantly have all these baby songs stuck in my head.

For the majority of January we visited Great Grandma Mary Josephine, who died on January 24th. I took the baby to see her nearly every day, as her health kept declining. When she stopped eating, she lasted 5 days before she passed away, so I am grateful for those last 5 days that we got to say goodbye. Our family was all together for her last night on Earth. We had food together as Maya crawled on the carpet. We said our final goodbyes and she passed away at dawn the next day.

It was very hard to lose someone who I thought would always be there - somebody who cared for me and nurtured me. It has been hard to grieve in front of the baby because I don't want to stress her out.

But there is something to be said about fate - if I had got pregnant 6 months later, than Grandma would have not met Maya, and I'm so thankful that she did. She left this Earth a Great Grandmother, and whatever happiness she received from seeing the baby is the best gift I could have given her.

We had her funeral on January 31st and it was a beautiful traditional Catholic ceremony, followed by the burial. She would have loved it. When it came time to bury her, the sun came out. Our whole family has been reunited over the past 2 weeks - we have deeply, emotionally connected to each other, in a way that we never did before. It has brought us closer. Grandma did that for us. She had an amazing ability to bring everyone together. She treated everyone with kindness and respect. She was a Mother to all.

With every death there lies an opportunity to live fuller & be more present & think of the things that loved one taught you. Going forward, that's how I'm want to live.